Lago hands engineering the controls over billing logic. Chargebee hands finance, product and RevOps the controls — and ships revenue recognition, dunning and payments they'd otherwise have to build themselves.
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Lago is a billing control layer for engineers. Chargebee is a revenue operations platform for the whole company.
| Capability | Chargebee | Lago | Before you choose Lago |
|---|---|---|---|
| Usage metering | Managed, 200K+ events/sec, schemaless | Strong metering engine, code-first | You own the infra; Chargebee owns it for you |
| Revenue recognition | Native ASC 606/IFRS 15, one system | Not included — build or buy separately | Another system your finance team owns |
| Dunning & recovery | ML-powered retries, smart collections | Excluded from self-hosted AGPLv3 tier | Failed payments erode MRR silently |
| Payment gateways | 30+ gateways, 150+ countries | Stripe, Adyen, GoCardless — limited set | Check your target markets before committing |
| Finance-team UX | No-code pricing, reports, exports | Engineer-first; steep curve for non-devs | Finance files tickets; engineers own billing |
| CPQ & quote-to-cash | Native CPQ, one product catalog | Not included | Sales-led deals need a separate quoting tool |
| Customer portal | Self-serve, white-labeled | Excluded from free self-hosted tier | Customers can't self-manage without cloud plan |
| Pricing | Free to $250K, then 0.75% | Self-hosted free; cloud — contact sales | Free comes with an infra and ops bill |
01
Self-hosting Lago means you own upgrades, infrastructure, security patches, and uptime. Chargebee is a fully managed platform — when something breaks at 2am, that's our problem, not yours. Finance and ops teams don't need to file tickets to change pricing or run reports.
02
Lago focuses on flexible billing execution and leaves accounting, reconciliation, and RevRec to external systems. Chargebee's native ASC 606/IFRS 15 subledger means a billing event is immediately a compliant revenue entry — no handoff, no reconciliation gap.
03
Lago's AGPLv3 free tier excludes dunning, credit notes, and the customer portal. Moving upstream to Lago's cloud plan means custom pricing. Chargebee includes ML-powered Smart Dunning and AR collections out of the box — recovering failed payments is part of the platform, not an upsell.
04
Lago is built for engineers who want to own billing code. Chargebee is built for the whole revenue team — finance edits pricing from a UI, RevOps pulls reports without a query, and product launches pricing experiments in an afternoon. When sales, finance and engineering share one system, the seams disappear.
Recognized on G2
Lago is a genuinely strong open-source billing engine. For the right team, it's the right choice.
If your engineers want billing logic living next to your product code — transparent, extensible, PR-reviewable — Lago's architecture is purpose-built for that.
Self-hosted Lago keeps billing data inside your own infrastructure — essential for some regulated industries and geographies.
Early-stage API or AI product teams who want metering and invoicing, and are happy to bolt on RevRec and dunning later as they grow.
See how Chargebee replaces Lago's engine — and every tool you'd need to build around it — with one managed platform.
